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Bullard, Claude L. wrote:
>Maybe we should bring cookies back from the museum of horrors and
>rehabilitate them (together with XML comments, PIs and other prematurely
>deprecated goodies)?
I agree with this,
In all likelihood, many sites store your info in both cookies and on their server. Cookies for persistent storage, so that they know you are the same person that logged in 2 weeks ago, and more detailed info on their server recording your usage history and the like. Most techies know to clean out their cookies regularly, and so it will be harder to track them, but the average consumer has no clue.
Cookies can be and are used to track individual's usage, but there are many other ways to track people. When I consider the primary method that was used to track people using cookies, it seems to me that it would be nearly as easy to track people without the use of cookies, using login session information.
IMHO, if we want to protect privacy, we won't be able to do it by removing the tools that invade it, but by punishing those that use the tools to invade it.
Right now the whole cookie issue is that people can use it to invade our privacy. It seems similar to the argument that a knife could be used to kill us. Should we prevent all knife sales? Should we ban the use of knives? That's ridiculous. We should punish people who use knives to kill.
Along that vein, if privacy is a concern of ours, I think our focus should be on creating laws to prevent the misuse of cookies or other technologies to invade our privacy.
Chris Strolia-Davis
Database Specialist
Contractor - CDO Technologies Inc.
-----Original Message-----
From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) [mailto:clbullar@ingr.com]
Sent: Monday, January 05, 2004 2:23 PM
To: 'Eric van der Vlist'; Rich Salz
Cc: Elliotte Rusty Harold; Edd Dumbill; David Kunkel; XML-DEV
Subject: RE: [xml-dev] Re: Cookies at XML Europe 2004 -- Call for
Particip ation
You make an excellent point. Do I want the information stored
on their computer or my computer? Considering that I can
delete a cookie at will, this looks like a no-brainer.
len
From: Eric van der Vlist [mailto:vdv@dyomedea.com]
On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 20:00, Rich Salz wrote:
> Secondarily, I don't know what the cookie is used for, but perhaps they
> intend to eventually (or in have previously done this) support some kind
> of session or login state; cookies are a natural for that (cf the title
> of the cookie RFC). Even if all that you're doing is avoiding
> re-verifying the password, that could be enough state to make a cookie
> reasonable.
Hmmm.... to concur, I have been thinking for a while where I'd prefer to
see some data such as the "Recently Viewed Products" stuff on Amazon
stored. I think that if I had the choice, I'd prefer to see them stored
as a cookie in my web browser than in the server's database.
Maybe we should bring cookies back from the museum of horrors and
rehabilitate them (together with XML comments, PIs and other prematurely
deprecated goodies)?
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